Bruce Bawer

Theodore Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956) is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam. Bawer's writings on literature, gay issues, and Islam have been seen as both controversial and affirming. While championing such authors as William Keepers Maxwell Jr., Flannery O'Connor, and Guy Davenport, he has criticized such authors as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow. 

A member of the New Formalists, a group of poets who promoted the use of traditional forms, he has assailed such poets as Allen Ginsberg for what he views as their lack of polish and technique. Bawer was one of the first gay activists to seriously propose same-sex marriage, especially in his book A Place at the Table (1993). While Europe Slept (2006) was one of the first to skeptically examine the rise of Islam(ism) and Sharia in the Western world, and The Victims' Revolution (2012) was an early criticism of academic identity studies.

Although he has been described as a conservative by some, Bawer has often argued that such labels are misleading or reductionist. He has explained his views as follows: "Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrendered one after the other, and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny."

Bawer is of Polish descent through his father and is of English, Welsh, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and French descent through his mother, whom he profiled in the September 2017 issue of Commentary. Born and raised in New York City, Bawer attended New York City public schools and Stony Brook University, where he studied literature under the poet Louis Simpson, among others. As a graduate student, he taught undergraduate courses in literature and composition. 

He earned a B.A. in English from Stony Brook in 1978, followed by an M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1983, both also in English. While in graduate school, he published essays in such academic journals as Notes on Modern American Literature and the Wallace Stevens Journal and opinion pieces in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. His dissertation, "The Middle Generation," was about the poets Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.

A revised version of Bawer's dissertation was published under the same title in 1986. Reviewing the book in The New Criterion, James Atlas called the "character analyses... shrewdly intuitive and sympathetic", found Bawer's "explanation for why the poets of the Middle Generation were so obsessed with [T.S.] Eliot especially persuasive," and described Bawer as "an impressive textual critic" with a "casual and self-assured" critical voice.

In Commonweal Magazine, Robert Phillips called Bawer "a critic of the first order, one of the best we have today." The book was named Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association. Bawer contributed to the arts journal The New Criterion every month between October 1983 and May 1993. A New York Times Magazine article, "The Changing World of New York Intellectuals," foregrounded the contributors to The New Criterion, observing that "The youthful contributors to Hilton Kramer's magazine—Bruce Bawer, Mimi Kramer, Roger Kimball—are still in their 20s, but they manage to sound like the British critic F.R. Leavis. 

Their articles are full of pronouncements about 'moral values,' 'the crisis in the humanities,' and the significance of art.' Their mission is to defend American culture against shoddy merchandise, and they don't shirk from the task."

During the 1980s, Bawer also contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post Book World, The Washington Times, The American Scholar, Poetry, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement. He served as an editor of the short-lived magazine Arrival, based in California, in 1987–88, was a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and editor of the NBCC Journal in 1989–90.

Bawer spent two years (1991–93) as University Preceptor at Adelphi University. In recent years, he has written considerably less literary criticism than he did in the 1980s. Much of it has appeared in The Hudson Review.